Silencio

From Eugen Gomringer, Book of Hours, 1968

I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.... If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? --Samuel Beckett

    Concrete silence. How to hear? Differential reading. It is the silence which allows the word to be heard and read. The blank space which allows the mark to be visible. Yet, the word ''silence'' cannot speak, even of itself. It is not silent. It is the place where both silence is heard and not heard, read and not read. This word is  merely a mark where both the act of saying and unsaying intersect. The unspeakable mark is not the opposite of noise or speech, but the dynamic moment of emergence of perception as such.

     Thus, this silence speaks the silence which allows it to speak, and which lets language speak, not as an unequivocal vocal/aural full plenitude or presence. It is the empty place where we perceive what by all rights we do not perceive. By silence, by naming that which is not itself, breaks its own sense, empties itself of its reason to be, its own meaning. Silence is not silence, and by this negation, makes itself heard, makes us hear and perceive what it is not. Yet, by unnaming itself in naming itself, it resounds as if by some miracle of perennial resurrection.

     Pure mark without meaning, it can now be seen but not heard. It ends by finally saying nothing, by becoming indistinguishable from the white spaces around it. Silent, it is unsignifying, and is now ironically full of itself because emptied of itself, without the need of language to speak. It has become what it speaks about, concretely true to itself by denying itself its own truth, its own possibility of being.

    Its self-repetition is a material and immaterial multiplication of perceptibility and imperceptibility. It implies the occupation of the entire material and phenomenal page of reading, both in its concretely imperceptible manifestation and concretely perceptible non-manifestation. What actually unfolds is a physical mark whose meaningful aura is indistinguishable from its reiteration as an opaque material event. It voids its status as a perceptible semantic event by assuming it fully.

    We are suspended between a phenomenal word we can say but whose meaning forbids its reading  to mean what it means, and a physical mark which in its muted form already embodies what it means but forbids its expression as perceptible word. Silence becomes a word we can say but whose meaning is emptied by saying it, or a word whose meaning can be perceived only by fulfilling its wish not to be perceived. If ever the word ''silence" would like to be faithful to the meaning it intends, it must fold within itself and hold its peace, that is, remain silent, and intend to say what it should not say, or should say what it does not intend to say, to say it. Thus, it loops upon itself, forever failing to succeed (in all the ambiguous senses this phrase conveys) to say what it should and should not say.

     In speaking about it now, can I really imagine to add anything more eloquent?

This is metaphor?

1) The denotationally possible, the self is never seen within the network of inherited metaphors, as an image whose identity it shares with other bodies. There is no final body, in the same way narrative doesn't have reference as its end point. Reference, denotationality, are relay points for further narratives and metaphors. Reading is the fluctuation, the eternal hesitation, between the image as body and the body as image. But what does it mean to say This IS metaphor? How can metaphor refer to metaphor, to itself? It must denotate itself as the impossibility of denotation, as the possibility of the impossibility of saying: This is it. If it is really metaphor, we cannot point it out without reducing it to a literal level. What does a literal metaphor mean? Mean and not be, or be and not mean? What is the being of metaphor, except this suspension of determination, as the suspension of both figurality and literality? Or how can we speak of metaphor in a non-metaphorical way? Can we speak of it in an ontology of being, in the form of the verb to be? Can we know what it is?

2) There is also one sense in which the paradoxical idea of an ontologically literal metaphor can take place: in the arrival of the Subject who can speak of itself, as self-consciousness. The Subject is the moment of the arrival of metaphor, as the bifurcation between image and body. The fact that it can designate itself as a binary and yet efface itself in this act of dualistic designation shows its double operational logic of opacity and transparency, of presence and absence, of materiality and ideality. Thus, it is no longer a strict choice between the literal and the metaphorical, but the always inaugural positing of the literal and figural in the performative production of languageness.

3) Popular culture like  Hollywood films, by supplying events, characters, objects, and a teleological and moral world endowed with clear values and identities, provides the reassuring affirmation of a clearly meaningful universe without the complexities of point of view and ambiguity. The master signifier without ambiguity (Barthes). A sense of crisis has not infected our speech. Denotation has fallen from the sky like magic from the gods.

4) The space of the codex, as page and as material seriality of pages, is next invoked as the bounded field in which semiosis is executed. It is the space of encounter, intersection, and propinquity of the material layout of signifiers dictating the rhythm of their reception. Propinquity, bibliographic code, basis of anaphora, cataphora. Limit border, the gutter, the page logic of confinement, ground of the rhetoric of coherence. By pointing out the involvement of the medium, the socio-pragmatics of signifying production or semiotic practice expands reading/writing to include the techno-material affordances of communication design technologies. Bibliographic and design codes are part of the material pragmatics of the sociology of script acts.

5) A culture defined essentially by its construction as memory and memorial is set, by a tautological extension, against the forces of forgetting. But forgetting, then, is a real element without which the culture of memory and the memory of culture lose their reason for being in various forms of ritual, art, education, recitations, songs, representations, commentary, journaling, recording, reporting, and so on. Time and space are accompanied with memory facilities, tools, techniques and technologies. Forgetting is at the core of our cultural dynamic, of language and the practice of languages. It is that chasm we wage war against, a history more enduring than human time itself. Writing paradoxically unites them as the practice of both remembering and forgetting. The pain of loss is equal to, and almost indistinguishable from, the pleasure of recovery. Metaphor is the marker of both the proximity and distance of that which is most culturally and consciously significant and signifying.